A Huge, Sunwarmed Animal
Edith Wharton
Camille Pisarro, 1895. Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art
Word Count 753
Summer, by Edith Wharton, is a largely overlooked masterpiece by an author best known for her gilded age novels about love among the upperclass. Fortunes are made; hearts are broken--that sort of thing. Summer concerns the story of sullen Charity Royal, a 17 year old orphan rescued from “the mountain” (a latter day equivalent of the wrong side of the tracks) to a small, Massachusetts town, where she tends the library and fends off the advances of her savior, an old man with a drinking problem. She sits around books all day, but her mind is untouched by their content. One day, a handsome young man enters the library and changes her life forever.
The book was banned in Wharton’s hometown library in Lenox, Massachusetts for its frank depiction of lust and veiled description of sex. Charity is a sensual character, in tune with the heat inside her and the nature all around her. I’ve always thought Wharton’s descriptions of a New England summer entwined with a young woman’s budding sexuality to be brilliant and since the copyright has expired, here are some of my favorites.--Rebecca Johnson
A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep. It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The springlike transparent sky shed a rain of silver sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of street when it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high and in the open, and lacks the lavish shade of the more protected New England villages. The clump of weeping-willows about the duck pond, and the Norway spruces in front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the only roadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and the point where, at the other end of the village, the road rises above the church.
She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the creak of the larches as they swayed to it. She often climbed up the hill and lay there alone for the mere pleasure of feeling the wind and of rubbing her cheeks in the grass. Generally at such times she did not think of anything, but lay immersed in an inarticulate well-being.
There had never been such a June in Eagle County. Usually it was a month of moods, with abrupt alternations of belated frost and midsummer heat; this year, day followed day in a sequence of temperate beauty. Every morning a breeze blew steadily from the hills. Toward noon it built up great canopies of white cloud that threw a cool shadow over fields and woods; then before sunset the clouds dissolved again, and the western light rained its unobstructed brightness on the valley.
On such an afternoon Charity Royall lay on a ridge above a sunlit hollow, her face pressed to the earth and the warm currents of the grass running through her. Directly in her line of vision a blackberry branch laid its frail white flowers and bluegreen leaves against the sky. Just beyond, a tuft of sweet- fern uncurled between the beaded shoots of the grass, and a small yellow butterfly vibrated over them like a fleck of sunshine. This was all she saw; but she felt, above her and about her, the strong growth of the beeches clothing the ridge, the rounding of pale green cones on countless spruce-branches, the push of myriads of sweet- fern fronds in the cracks of the stony slope below the wood, and the crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flags in the pasture beyond. All this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting of calyxes was carried to her on mingled currents of fragrance. Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to contribute its exhalation to the pervading sweetness in which the pungency of pine-sap prevailed over the spice of thyme and the subtle perfume of fern, and all were merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the breath of some huge sun-warmed animal.